Dealing with waste water is an issue for temporary and/or remote locations. Construction, mining, oilfields and military operations are all industries that often require providing personnel at temporary and/or remote locations, often for a relatively short time and for a relatively few number of people. Waste water in the form of black water from human waste and other sources and grey water has to be dealt with at these temporary and/or remote locations.
For example, in the oilfield business well sites often require a workforce of a half dozen personal or less for a short period of time to service a well site. Sometimes these work crews can be present at a well site for only a few days or as little time as a few hours. These well sites are typically in remote locations making it uneconomical to provide waste treatment facilities at these sites on a permanent basis.
Additionally, waste water facilities in remote locations can fail and the waste water at these remote locations must be dealt with during the time the normal waste water facilities are not operating.
Historically, these work sites could simply dump their untreated waste water on or in the ground; however, regulations have put an end to this practice in many areas and now the untreated waste water at these sites must be dealt with in another way. While a waste water treatment facility can be constructed at the remote site, this is often uneconomical for work camps that are only temporary or are unoccupied for long periods of time. Typically at these sites this waste water and raw sewage generated by the people at the site is stored in a portable tank. When the portable tank is full of untreated waste water or the people are leaving the site, the portable tank full of untreated waste water is then transported to a suitable waste water treatment facility or other location that will accept the untreated waste water and the untreated waste water in the portable tank is then discharged at the discharge location. Once the untreated waste water is discharged from the portable tank at the discharge area, the portable tank can then be transported back to the work site or it can be transported to a new site location and once more used to store waste water.
This system of transporting untreated waste water requires the untreated waste water to be transported to a facility that accepts the untreated waste water. Disposal sites that will accept this untreated waste water can be quite far from the temporary work sites, especially in more remote locations, requiring the portable tank to be transported quite far to and from the disposal site. It can also cause logistical problems with moving sites because the portable tank of waste water might have to be transported quite far away from the new site causing the waste water tank to not arrive at the new site until much after the personnel have arrived at the new site.
Additionally, waste water treatment facilities typically charge a higher rate for taking untreated waste water.